Intensive care ward occupancy down to 75% from 84% this time last year
Hospitals across country declaring incidents as they struggle to cope
But wards are less busy too – 89% full compared to 95% in December 2019
NHS warns of invisible pressures unique to Covid, such as ward segregation
NHS data still shows hospitals to be quieter than they were this time last year even as coronavirus’s second wave bites and the number of Covid patients approaches levels seen in the crisis’s peak in April.
When children and teens are overwhelmed with anxiety, depression or thoughts of self-harm, they often wait days in emergency rooms because there aren’t enough psychiatric beds.
The problem has only grown worse during the pandemic, reports from parents and professionals suggest.
With schools closed, routines disrupted and parents anxious over lost income or uncertain futures, children are shouldering new burdens many are unequipped to bear.
The Imperial model had larger errors, about 5-fold higher than other models by six weeks. This appears to be largely driven by the aforementioned tendency to overestimate mortality. At twelve weeks, MAPE values were lowest for the IHME-MS-SEIR (23.7%) model, while the Imperial model had the most elevated MAPE (98.8%). Predictive performance between models was generally similar for median absolute errors (MAEs)
Shelley Tasker, 43, from Camborne, Cornwall, resigned from Treliske hospital
Healthcare assistant made speech outside Truro cathedral and revealed what’s been going on behind closed doors of NHS hospitals
Claims she had no work for three weeks at height of pandemic due to no patients
“I can tell you on Friday in Treliske there were three people in with Covid. No extra deaths, three – and that covers Treliske, West Cornwall and Hayle hospital…The total deaths from these three hospitals in seven months, is 76 people – that’s about ten people a month over the last seven months, and we have locked down.”
* Beds have never been less than 85% full for a three-month period since 2010 * Spring this year was the first time, because patients were turfed out for Covid-19 * And occupancy remains below average levels despite second wave, stat shows * Boris Johnson has returned to his ‘protect the NHS’ slogan for second lockdown
NHS hospitals in England appear quieter than usual for this time of year even though they are treating more than 9,000 patients with coronavirus.
Update seen by Telegraph shows capacity tracking as normal for beginning of November, with usual numbers of beds available
Hospital intensive care is no busier than normal for the majority of trusts, leaked documents have shown, raising more questions about whether a second national lockdown is justifiable.
We have experience of SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012, while in the UK there are at least four known strains of coronavirus which cause the common cold.
Many individuals who’ve been infected by other coronaviruses have immunity to closely related ones such as the Covid-19 virus.
Multiple research groups in Europe and the US have shown that around 30 per cent of the population was likely already immune to Covid-19 before the virus arrived – something which Sage continues to ignore.
Prof. John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology at Stanford University in California, have concluded that the mortality rate is closer to 0.2 per cent – 1 in 500 infected die.
Around 45,000 Covid deaths in the UK
Approximately 22.5million people have been infected – 33.5 per cent of our population – not Sage’s 7 per cent calculation.
Not every infected individual produces antibodies.
The human immune system has several lines of defence:
Innate immunity which is comprised of the body’s physical barriers to infection and protective secretions (the skin and its oils, the cough reflex, tears etc);
Inflammatory response (to localise and minimise infection and injury), and the production of non-specific cells (phagocytes) that target an invading virus/bacterium.
Antibodies that protect against a specific virus or bacterium (and confer immunity) and T-cells (a type of white blood cell) that are also specific.
T-cells that are crucial in our body’s response to respiratory viruses such as Covid-19.
World Health Organisation says 750million people have been infected by the virus as of October and almost none have been reinfected.
Mortality in 2020 so far ranks eighth out of the last 27 years.
The death rate at present is also normal for the time of year – the number of respiratory deaths is actually low for late October.
Not only is the virus less dangerous than we are being led to believe, with almost three quarters of the population at no risk of infection.
I am convinced this so-called second wave of rising infections and, sadly, deaths will fizzle out without overwhelming the NHS.
Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, has gone back to Plan A, reviving his ‘protect the NHS’ message from March and now wears a facemask with those words on it. The Prime Minister is repeating the slogan. It’s deeply controversial with senior doctors who fear that it discourages the sick from seeking help – which might explain the 28,000 excess at-home deaths over the last few months. The NHS is worried about this and has countered with its own advert, urging people to seek medical help. I looked at this in my latest Daily Telegraph column.
The NHS has learned much from the first wave of Covid. PPE equipment, for example, is now in bountiful supply. Basic medical techniques – better use of blood thinners, oxygen therapy, steroids etc – are having a big impact on survival rates. When Boris Johnson went into intensive care, his survival chances were about 50 per cent. Now, they would be closer to 70 per cent. The trajectory this time is nowhere near as daunting – the below graph shows the rise of Covid patients needing critical care. As the data shows, intensive care unit (ICU) usage is 13 per cent of what it was at the end of March. (These figures are from the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre.)
The NHS has ‘significantly less’ beds now than last winter and parts of the system ‘don’t have enough’, a NHS England and Improvement director has admitted.
The UK Government’s Test and Trace policy isn’t working and is worse than useless.
40 per cent of those asked to name their recent contacts were unable to remember anyone.
The tests on which Test and Trace is based are highly unreliable.
Covid is a coronavirus and its symptoms are vague: a cough, a raised temperature, the loss of taste and smell — all of which overlap with the symptoms for flu and the common cold.
When the procedure goes wrong, it generates a ‘false positive’ result: it indicates an infection where none exists.
Even with long-established tests, we’d expect to see false positives in perhaps one per cent of cases. With this one, it could quite conceivably be 5 per cent or higher.
This means that if 300,000 tests are processed in a day, perhaps 15,000 or more will generate inaccurate reports of Covid-19 infection.
One positive is not necessarily the same as another, but the Government numbers don’t differentiate.
Last week, it was reported that just 1,800 out of 110,000 occupied beds in hospitals were taken up by Covid-19 patients.
It is likely that those who died were elderly and suffering from co-morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes.
But it is also possible that they died from something else entirely — such as flu.
The UK Government’s Test and Trace policy isn’t working and is worse than useless.
40 per cent of those asked to name their recent contacts were unable to remember anyone.
The tests on which Test and Trace is based are highly unreliable.
Covid is a coronavirus and its symptoms are vague: a cough, a raised temperature, the loss of taste and smell — all of which overlap with the symptoms for flu and the common cold.
When the procedure goes wrong, it generates a ‘false positive’ result: it indicates an infection where none exists.
Even with long-established tests, we’d expect to see false positives in perhaps one per cent of cases. With this one, it could quite conceivably be 5 per cent or higher.
This means that if 300,000 tests are processed in a day, perhaps 15,000 or more will generate inaccurate reports of Covid-19 infection.
One positive is not necessarily the same as another, but the Government numbers don’t differentiate.
Last week, it was reported that just 1,800 out of 110,000 occupied beds in hospitals were taken up by Covid-19 patients.
It is likely that those who died were elderly and suffering from co-morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes.
But it is also possible that they died from something else entirely — such as flu.
Coronaviruses are as old as humanity and have resisted every attempt at a vaccine or a cure. One project to wipe out the common cold was funded for more than 40 years — and got nowhere.
Today’s flu vaccines are less than 50 per cent effective, and there is no chance whatever that a hurriedly developed Covid-19 vaccine could be anything like as good as that.
75,000 people could die from non-Covid causes as a result of lockdown to devastating official figures in a 188-page document from SAGE.
16,000 people died as a result of the chaos in hospitals and care homes in March and April alone.
A further 26,000 will die within a year if people continue to stay away from A&E.
An additional 31,900 could die over the next five years as a result of missed cancer diagnoses, cancelled operations and the health impacts of a recession.
Official COVID-19 death toll on 29 September 2020 is 41,936.
Covid-19 patients are currently occupying fewer than 2 per cent of all hospital beds in England, official data suggests.
The most NHS recent snapshot — released three weeks ago — shows just 478 out of 110,000 beds in use were by Covid-19 patients on September 3.
…Even at the peak of the crisis in Britain, only a quarter of all beds were occupied by virus patients. On April 7, 26.5 per cent of the 67,206 people in England’s hospitals were being treated for coronavirus — the highest proportion on record.
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